


a girl with no ground

by leiascully



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-02
Updated: 2009-06-02
Packaged: 2017-10-03 04:47:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a girl with no ground

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: post-_Serenity_  
> A/N: By special request, after all this time.   
> Disclaimer: _Firefly_ and all related characters belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy Productions.

River wants.

Isn't sure what she wants, isn't sure enough of who she is to know. It's just something that comes over her, sneaks up like the things They put inside her, but it comes from deeper. It's a wildness. She doesn't understand it. Just a thing that happens.

She's restless. Girl with no ground, always in an excited state. Molecules jumping and rattling through all that empty space she is. Not even flying can contain all the glory in her; she's short with Mal, sulky like the petulant child she never was, is now, all stunted thanks to Them. Holding her down with their blue hands as they built her up, so that her body is a tower, is a weapon that she lives in, but somewhere in there is the fifth birthday princess, the twelve year old who hacked off her kimono to make a minidress, and now, the nineteen year old heavy-lidded and hot of breath, her bones aching to be shaken.

River, in the abstract, knows what this is: a chemical rush, a biological swoon. Some days she feels like everything she knows is theoretical, somewhere out there, not practical or physical or useful, and she can't find a use for any of the thoughts that cram her head until she presses her hands to her temples. At least those days are rarer now. More the girl now, less the girl-shaped thing they made of her.

More the woman. She hopes, anyway. No one here to show her what that means: Mal with his ship and his Companion and Simon too distracted to explain even.

Jayne. The man with the girl's name. The mercenary with the big hands caressing the guitar. Contradictions. Instincts. Brawn with that strange touch of unwitting grace and compassion. He smells good too, calls to her somehow. He is not quite one thing and not quite the other. Un-whole, unholy.

She wants him.

Simon, kissing Kaylee in the ship's comfortably dark corners, doesn't even notice that she has Jayne lined up in her sights like she might slit him open just to see what's inside. But River is patient, even on days when her system's so full of _need_ that she's tiptoeing like her combat boots are the pointe shoes she had when she was small, almost off the ground with yearning.

River finds Jayne alone in the mess. She lingers in the hatchway, gripping the frame so she won't float away. He's peeling an apple with his knife, long red streaks lapping over his knife, the skin one perfect curl. The white flesh of the apple gleams. So exact, so perfect, so strange from someone hewn rough out of manflesh. He drops the peel onto the table, skewers the apple with his blade, and sinks his teeth in. She shakes her hair back, trying for a clearer line, and he catches sight of her.

"Whaddyawant?" he mumbles, licking apple juice from his lip. He is sloppy, mouth full of apple and cheeks stubbled. She is fascinated and says nothing. Two steps closer, light feet in heavy shoes and something unfolding inside her: she stalks her prey.

"Eerie ass female," he mutters, taking another noisy bite. The muscle in his jaw tenses, eases, and she is hypnotized. Dreamily, she reaches out and slaps him.

He has caught her wrist before she can think; she has twisted away before he can breathe. A hot wind twists inside her, full of glinting joy that scours her raw. There is a pink mark on his tan cheek. She slaps him again. He drops the apple - splat! - and grabs both her wrists in his big hands.

"Cut that out, you pint-sized lunatic," he says, his voice rough.

"Why should I?" she asks. She uses the lucid, haughty voice she knows he loathes, as if her cogent madness is only just beyond his earthy wit.

"It ain't polite to come slap a man for no gorram reason," he says, and eyes her.

"Maybe I had a reason," she says, putting her nose in the air.

"Maybe I had an apple and now it's all spoiled thanks to some no-account crazy-ass waif with pretensions to violence," he grumbles. "Though I s'pose I ought to be glad it weren't a knife this time." His hands are warm, his fingers rough as he shifts both her wrists into one palm and retrieves his apple. He examines it, blows off a few crumbs, and takes another bite.

"Release me, please," she says, playing the princess again.

"Hell's balls got a better chance of freezing solid," he says. "Not inclined to set you free with you in a mood, little sister."

"I'm not _your_ sister," she reminds him.

He eyes her up and down. She looks down through her eyelashes the way she's seen Inara do and he grunts. "That's certain."

"Jayne Cobb," she says, rolling the syllables of his name in her mouth like she wants them to melt there. "The man they call Jayne. Apples and grenades, mayhem and credits. The mudders' hero. Savior of the whores. Mal's long arm." He studies her. She feigns a blush and widens her eyes.

"Preacher couldn't riddle through your game today," he says, and fans his fingers out, freeing her. He lifts his apple again, crunching into it, ignoring her. "Run and play. I got things to do."

She leans close, closer, hardly a handsbreadth from his face. "You haven't got anything to do. Mal said stay while they're out shopping. We can play together."

"Wish they'd locked you in when they left," he grumbles.

"Come out and play with me," she sings softly. "Climb up my apple tree."

"You got no idea what you're toying with, girl," he says, but there's a new low rumble in his voice. She can feel it in her bones.

She leans forward, easing closer still, and then kisses him quick as a flash. He flinches, then leans into her, but she's already pulled back, licking the sweet trace of apple off her lips. Taste of sin, taste of knowing.

"Girl, you're playin' with fire," he warns. She kisses him again, quicker than the last, and then slaps him across the face as she springs away, arms held so perfectly her ballet teacher would weep to see her. Jayne's not weeping. He grabs for her and she spins in, gets him with the back of her hand, and spins under his sweeping arm.

"Gorramit," he swears, and finally throws a fist at her. She catches it, the rush of joy matching the sting in her palm, and this is the kind of conversation she understands, the way she understands it when the stars talk to her, and the ship. She lands another blow and he manages to smack her shoulder as she ducks; they spar, she delighted, he determined, until he remembers his bulk and shoves her against the counter. She knots her fingers in his hair and drags his head down to kiss him before he can throw her through the door and bolt it behind her.

"Crazy-ass female," he mumbles against her mouth. "Was that all?"

"Little playmate," she taunts him. "Slide down my cellar door."

"Not so little," he protests. "Show you good and all."

"Show me," she says.

He hoists her like she weighs nothing. She struggles with his shirt. Another t-shirt, can of cola printed on the jersey. Knitted thing, a thousand stitches in an inch, made in a factory just like her. She thinks of the time she sliced him, the red line across his chest. The edges of the wound like lips, like the lips she's kissing, red with life. Easier to bring the life in him out this way: less pain,the energy between them rushing higher like the backflow from a Crazy Ivan.

Jayne at least knows what he's doing. She tries not to read these days but still she catches flashes of the women he's been with as he undresses her, his mouth less than tender but so welcome. He's not mean but he's not sweet either, just real and solid when she throws her legs around him. He caresses her, his calluses exquisite against her sensitive places, almost the only place the doctors didn't touch. It didn't matter to them, this cluster of nerves. It matters to him. Short-circuits, all her wires crossed, her back arching. He's found her out, unraveled her. She remembers the flesh over steel bones and wire muscle. Her fingers dig into his back until she thinks her nails will pierce him, but in her sea of stars he's still there, iron and sinew just like they made him too and oh, isn't she full of revelations, miracles and chemicals and a sweet burn that flares through her and shakes her until she's gasping.

He slides his fingers in her and it hurts, but just a little, a stubbed toe in the scheme of things, and she can feel she's slick, she knows it's right from those books she snuck from Kaylee's stash, the vid that Wash and Zoe made.

"Everything shiny?" he asks.

"Shiny," she breathes back. It's almost funny, the look of concern on his face. Funny to think of Jayne, meathead hired-gun Jayne, thinking about someone else. But he waits until she nods, waits until she tugs at him. She's done with nameless urges: she wants. She wants to know. She wants to name it. His mouth comes down over hers and it isn't romantic but it's what she needs. Girl not machine. She makes her own destiny; life on the fringe is inappropriate and rude and scuffed and dirty but it's real and it's hers and it's life.

When he pushes in it hurts again but only for a second and it's sure as good gorram not the worst thing she's ever been through, and then. Then. Oh.

She _knows_ in a blooming burst of joy, a surge like every spring there's ever been. Jayne groans into her neck, her hair caught in his mouth, and rolls to the side. They lie there, chests heaving, sweaty and triumphant like they just pulled off a major heist. His arm is thrown across her belly, but he doesn't move it. She doesn't move either, doesn't have the bones or the volition for it. She can feel her molecules vibrating, music of the spheres, electrons jumping with delight. There's her excited state; there's her afterglow; there's the diminishing tempo of her heartbeat, the decrescendo of their breath, the arabesque of satiation as she curls into him in the bed.

"We'll be jolly friends forevermore," she half-hums to herself, too pleasure-wracked to move her lips much. He grunts and then starts snoring. She closes her eyes and smiles to herself.


End file.
